Couple Gets Engaged in Crop-Duster
DAVENPORT, Wash. (AP) - It was the perfect date for the farmer and the farmer's daughter.
Last March 29, Kyle Zellmer hired a crop-duster to take him and his girlfriend, Kristin Alme, on an aerial tour of the Davenport area.
Pilot Lee Swain showed them all the sights between the Columbia River and Harrington. Then Swain flew to a field of wheat stubble near Zellmer's home just outside Davenport.
There, in block letters 100 feet tall, was the question: "Will you marry me Kristin?"
Alme was too surprised to answer.
"I think I asked him first, 'How did you do that?"' she said.
"Repeatedly," Zellmer added. "And then she said, 'Oh, yes."'
"I was just waiting for the right gal to do it for," said Zellmer, 30.
He found her on March 23 last year after some matchmaking by mutual friends. Alme, 23, grew up on a farm near Shelby, Mont., and had been a student at Eastern Washington University for three years at the time.
Zellmer knocked on her door the next night to take her to dinner and a movie in Spokane.
"When I opened the door, the first thing I thought was I was going to marry him," Alme said. "It was kind of an odd thing."
Zellmer also quickly realized "she was the one."
The marriage is scheduled for Sept. 13 at the Davenport United Methodist Church.
Zellmer used a cultivator and some help from his father to carve the proposal into the soil. The project took about six hours over two days.
"It was perfectly readable," Alme said. "I guess I never realized you could write in a field."